At no point during Ontario Gothic does it sound like an album that would be subject to outside expectations, let alone hype. Foxes in Fiction’s second LP abounds with reverb-insulated synths, lo-res drums, Warren Hildebrand’s barely whispered vocals and little else; this is music for and by people who worry about waking up their roommates, not their neighbors. But as a man once said, the underground just spun around and did a 360. Hildebrand’s first Foxes In Fiction full-length, the 2010 release Swung From the Branches, was a charming bedroom databank of feverishly devout Atlas Sound worship with an even more endearing presentation; reeling from the death of his teenage brother, Hildebrand posted a story behind every one of its 22 tracks on his MySpace page. Four years later, Hildebrand's Bushwick-based "bedroom pop" cassette label Orchid Tapes, named after a Deerhunter song, has likewise been lauded by the internet-savvy for its presentation—a loose stylistic affiliation of extroverts making introverted art.
Ontario Gothic ditches the tape loops, drones and noise collages that padded out Swung from the Branches, its weight distributed amongst seven fleshy tracks. It’s a concise statement of purpose that showcases a single kind of Foxes in Fiction song: downtempo and arctic in ambience, compositionally minimal, and “pop” in the sense that they contain repeating melodic lines. Though they're not based on samples and loops as overtly as his Bradford Cox mash-notes of the past, they might as well be.
While some of Hildebrand’s fellow Orchid Tapes artists have become persons of interest, Ontario Gothic taps a relative superstar in Owen Pallett, who lends string arrangements. According to the credits, Pallett laid tracks in London years after Hildebrand completed them in his apartment, and they’re sweeping, sumptuous and weirdly conservative compared to his own work, but they give Hildebrand’s otherwise modest and muted music all the luxury it can bear; whenever those horsehairs well up, it’s like noticing an extremely expensive belt on a guy in a T-shirt and jeans.
But in shifting the focus from Hildebrand as scattered and prodigious to someone meant to be evaluated on execution, Ontario Gothic exposes a guy who has a lot of interesting ideas about music, but few interesting musical ideas. In retrospect, the “pop” songs on Swung from the Branches (“15 Ativan (Song for Erika)”, “Memory Pools”) were notable for their ingenuity, immersive atmosphere, and context; within a primarily ambient record, they stood out by default. At its best, Ontario Gothic is dream-pop projected as a warm, friendly embrace rather than as an enveloping mystery. Chords progress predictably and are grouped in predictable patterns, Hildebrand’s placid melodies do maintain an underlying humane warmth, reverb is a given, rather than a textural tool, and his dynamics are limited to a mesmeric repetition or a building by incremental overlap.
If “March 2011” was dunked in guitar distortion, it could pass for the droning doom-gaze from the likes of Whirr or Nothing, while the relatively uptempo “Glow (v079)” could slide undetected into a more recent Kompakt Pop Ambient mix. But otherwise, Ontario Gothic is truly ambient pop—for all of its homemade and “personal” presentation, there’s little that distinguishes it as the work of Warren Hildebrand. His lyrics are often emotional tracework, indicative of someone in touch with his feelings but often lacking poetic expression: too vague to really hit a nerve, lacking the mystery to inspire further discovery. His imagery is borne of light, shade, water, and the like—“My shadow was drowned in a sea underground” is the standard lyrical fare here. It’s not until “Altars”, a group chorale/requiem with the very idiosyncratic no-fi folk act Julia Brown, that Ontario Gothic actually comes to life, as Orchid Tapes’ communal uplift is presented in real time, recalling a washed out version of the all-hands-on-deck songs that would pop up on Saddle Creek records back when they were young, wildly prolific, and still hanging out together.
That speaks to the appeal of Orchid Tapes in the first place, a collective that stands to snag the interest of anyone invested in the concepts of “punk”, “indie”, “scene”, and “DIY”. So the charm of Ontario Gothic is derived from one of the most thrilling and rewarding feelings one can have as an artist, or simply a consumer of art—that great music can be created amongst your friends, and how the resulting feeling can come across as more inherently special than anything consumed on a mass scale. Ontario Gothic is certainly part of a great story; but as a perfectly satisfying half hour of modest and common dream-pop, it's not much of a story on its own.
